TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Taiwan is considering building a dedicated pandemic hospital in the wake of the Taoyuan hospital cluster outbreak that has made national headlines over the past month.
The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) declared on Sunday (Feb. 7) that the threat of further infections from the northern Taiwan hospital has been defused after rigorous COVID-19 testing provided all negative results.
While urging the public not to let their guard down, Health Minister and CECC head Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) said authorities are mulling establishing a hospital devoted to pandemic control. They will also review the standard response procedures for a potential community outbreak, he added at a news briefing on Sunday.
The Taoyuan General Hospital cluster infection, which began in early January, involved 20 cases among medical workers and their family members, patients, as well as caretakers. The outbreak and its aftermath have been the biggest challenges facing Taiwan, which has gained international acclaim for its virus control measures.
Lee Ming-cheng (李明政), director at Cheng Hsin General Hospital’s Department of Infectious Diseases, lauded the CECC’s effort to contain the outbreak without the need to seal off the whole hospital, as had been done during the 2002 SARS pandemic. Nevertheless, he believes the CECC should have implemented quarantines on a greater scale at the onset of the incident, because several confirmed cases were excluded from the high-risk groups associated with the hospital, wrote Liberty Times.
Around 5,000 individuals were placed in isolation — the largest ever for the country — in a ramped-up effort to rein in the spread of the disease.
Huang Li-min (黃立民), president of the Infectious Disease Society of Taiwan and superintendent of the National Taiwan University Children's Hospital, echoed Lee’s view that stricter measures should have been taken earlier.
Meanwhile, he cautioned that community transmission risks should be closely watched for two more weeks and that better personnel management of interdisciplinary departments is needed to avoid hospital cluster infections from happening again.
